It’s been a no good, very bad month for Samsung: The Korean electronics company has been forced to discontinue its hotly anticipated line of Galaxy Note 7 smartphones after widespread battery failures caused the devices to catch fire.

One thing that can happen is that a thin, paperlike barrier inside of the battery that keeps the positive and negative electrodes from touching may get punctured. The other way a battery can fail is if a buildup of carbon dioxide occurs due to high internal temperatures. That can cause the battery to swell up within its hermetically sealed casing.

Hamers said Silatronix had initially been pitching an electrolyte to manufacturers that was rich enough in the organosilicons that it rendered a lithium battery totally inflammable. However, companies weren’t sold on the product, since it necessitated a trade-off in terms of battery life.

The product that Silatronix is now pushing is a compromise of sorts: It doesn’t totally eliminate the flammability risk, but it does mitigate it. Plus, there’s an upside that’s grabbed the attention of battery manufacturers.

“There’s actually an increase in performance — you can have higher temperatures, but no risk of a gassing problem,” said Hamers.

It’s a class of compounds, he said, that’s “unlike anything that anyone has used before.”

Hamers said that Silatronix is in the process of testing its product with all of the major battery manufacturers in the world right now. The dragon to slay after that, he said, will be introducing the safer lithium ion batteries to the world on a major scale, in some sort of major consumer product.

Read more at Madison.com.

Madison Vaccines Incorporated (MVI), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, says initial analysis of the first 13 patients enrolled in the MVI-118 clinical trial shows acceptable safety and tolerability, and enhanced patient immune response to the AR antigen encoded by the vaccine. The human androgen receptor is the critical biological target that drives the progression of prostate cancer and, in many cases, is responsible for the resistance to current therapies. MVI-118 is being developed to prolong the duration of disease control gained from standard hormone deprivation therapies. The findings will be presented at the annual Prostate Cancer Foundation Scientific Retreat, October 27, in Carlsbad, CA, just north of San Diego.

Read more at MadisonVaccinesInc.com.

HealthMyne, a fast-growing Madison start-up that that provides analytics for medical images in cancer care, has raised $6.9 million of investments, according to a filing with federal securities regulators.

The company, which lists among its co-founders the medical physicist who developed the technology behind TomoTherapy Inc., will use the proceeds for research and development and general corporate purposes, the filing said. There were 23 investors participating in the deal, it said.

The investment puts the amount of funding the three-year-old company has raised over $10 million. HealthMyne most recently raised $4.5 million in March 2015.

HealthMyne operates in the emerging field of quantitative imaging decision support software, which treats medical images not just as pictures but as rich deposits of data that provide large amounts of information for decoding cancer tumors.

The company’s software is being tested at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics and Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, Fla.

Read more at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

HealthMyne, a healthcare IT startup based in Madison, WI, has named Arvind Subramanian as its new chief executive, the company said Monday. Subramanian’s first day at HealthMyne was Aug. 1, he said in a phone interview.

Subramanian replaces Praveen Sinha, who co-founded HealthMyne in 2013. Sinha will now be vice president of business development, the startup said in a press release.

Also joining HealthMyne, whose headcount currently stands at 24, is Linda Peitzman. She is a physician with extensive experience in healthtech, and will serve as the startup’s chief medical and informatics officer. Her first day at HealthMyne was Tuesday, she said, adding that she is the sole medical doctor at the company.

Peitzman and Subramanian share quite a bit of history. They have worked together for a total of 14 years, most recently at the Health Clinical Solutions business unit of Netherlands-based Wolters Kluwer. Before that, they were colleagues at ProVation Medical, a Minneapolis-based healthcare software company that Wolters Kluwer acquired in 2006. “We know each other well,” said Subramanian, who has also joined HealthMyne’s board of directors.

Read more at Xconomy.

Petroleum refiner and marketer Tesoro Corp. plans to acquire Madison-based renewable fuels technology company Virent Inc. this month, both companies announced Tuesday.

San Antonio-based Tesoro, which invested in Virent earlier this year, said it views the acquisition as a way to accelerate the commercial development of the Madison company’s renewable energy technology.

Virent will continue to operate from Madison, where it has its office as well as pilot and demonstration plants for biogasoline.

“With this acquisition, Tesoro intends to foster more rapid commercialization of Virent’s renewables technology, which could uniquely position the company with an improved means of future regulatory compliance, as well as potential licensing opportunities,” said CJ Warner, Tesoro executive vice president of operations, in a statement. “Tesoro plans to provide resources and expertise to support the scale-up and commercialization of the technology while maintaining Virent’s innovative culture and business that are key to its success.”

Read more at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Zurex Pharma, which is developing antimicrobial products for healthcare-associated infections, has raised more than $6.2 million in equity funding, according to a regulatory filing that was made public on Thursday.

In a press release, Middleton, WI-based Zurex said the money is an “initial close of a Series C financing,” and will be used in part to support a late-stage clinical trial of its lead product candidate, ZuraPrep, a pre-surgical skin preparation. This particular investment could top out at $8 million, according to the filing.

Zurex said that some of the 26 participating investors had backed the company previously, while others were first-time investors.

Read more at Xconomy.

Phoenix Nuclear Labs (PNL) announced today that it has been awarded multiple contracts by the U.S. Army totaling $3.6 million. Under these contracts, PNL will build an advanced neutron radiography system to detect defective munitions and demonstrate the ability to use their neutron generators to detect and identify concealed explosive threats.

The company will deliver an upgraded, pilot production neutron radiography system that will be the first such system to be installed in a munitions production facility.  The new system is expected to produce 10 times higher neutron yield, enabling faster performance and higher resolution.  It will be capable of producing digital images that will improve the system’s ability to analyze and store data.

In parallel, the Neutron-Emitting Mobile Explosives Sensing and Identification System (NEMESIS) will utilize PNL’s commercial neutron generator technology to demonstrate active neutron interrogation for explosive threat detection. The strong, compact neutron generator developed by PNL over the last 11 years is the enabling technology for mobile explosive threat detection from large standoff distances, greatly enhancing existing warfighter capabilities.

Madison, WI-based Invenra has raised more than $3 million from 27 investors, according to a document filed with federal securities regulators.

Mark Kubik, the company’s vice president of business development, says that some of the money will go toward fulfilling agreements it’s made with drug companies, including U.K.-based Oxford BioTherapeutics, which Invenra announced it had partnered with last year.

Invenra’s cell-free protein expression technology allows for the screening of hundreds of thousands of full antibodies, and is much faster than conventional cell-based methods for finding therapeutic antibodies.

The company’s core business model involves licensing its technology to drug makers, Kubik says. With these deals, the pharmaceutical partner owns and is responsible for developing the antibody products.

However, Kubik says that Invenra is also exploring the possibility of forging agreements where it would be responsible for providing some of the resources to develop molecules—people and money, namely—and ultimately get to share in the rights to drug candidates.

Read more at Xconomy.

It may seem an unlikely location for a salmon business, but since late 2012, pursuing a grassroots, one-city-at-a-time strategy, Sitka has seen enough growth in sales and distribution to establish hubs in major cities like Chicago and Indianapolis, allowing the company to spread to more than 10 major metro areas across the Midwest. With projected annual sales of $4 million this year, Sitka currently has more than 2,500 members, more than 100 wholesale accounts, and is poised to move roughly 100,000 pounds of salmon this year, making it one of the largest community-supported fisheries in the nation. The company employs a number of full-time employees in several locations and works with 13 sustainable fisherman-owners with the hope of increasing that number to 20 by year’s end. The company also recently opened its own processing and packaging facility in Alaska to streamline its supply chain and leverage greater control of its product from the boat to the consumer, a process that today typically takes about 20 days from dock to dish and includes flash-freezing, transportation from Sitka to Galesburg, and then on to customers.

Read more at CivilEats.com.

Silatronix, a Madison, WI-based developer of silicon-based materials that can be used as electrolytes in batteries and other energy storage devices, has raised $8 million from investors, the company said in a press release.

Participants in the equity funding round included Hitachi Chemical and Inabata, both of Japan, and previous investors, Silatronix said. Inabata will serve as an exclusive distributor to certain customers in Asia, according to the release.

The materials Silatronix makes, which are partially made of organosilicon (OS) compounds containing carbon-silicon bonds, can function as electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries. Those are used in everything from phones and tablets to electric vehicles.

The global market for lithium-ion batteries is projected to eclipse $30 billion a year by 2020, according to a report by Taiyou Research. By that time, the market for electrolytes used in batteries is expected to reach at least $1.1 billion, according to Silatronix’s website. Increased production of electric vehicles by automakers like Tesla and General Motors have contributed to the rapid growth in advanced battery technologies.

The new money will help support efforts to commercialize Silatronix’s first product, known as OS3, a solvent that the company said can improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries.

“The path to large-scale commercialization at Silatronix is increasingly visible,” said Mark Zager, CEO of Silatronix, in a prepared statement. “We are helping the market develop batteries with improved safety, performance, and stability.”

Read more at Xconomy.